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This article illuminates through a case study, SuPPORT 4 All (Support, Positioning and Organ stabilisation during breast cancer radiation therapy/S4A). It describes how three-dimensional design research assesses, assimilates and is applied to define product requirements in a cross-disciplinary research team, activity occurring concurrently, yet also informing the act of designing the eventual products themselves. The study describes how a multidisciplinary research and development team, more specifically the design researchers within it, developed a range of holistic knowledge sets to establish critical criteria to validate physical outcomes. The study illustrates the methods used and developed to elicit the scale of the challenge and discusses the validity of these methods and technologies when wide-ranging design specifications may not exist at project outset.

People with Motor Neuron Disease (MND) experience muscle weakness. The human head can weigh 5kg so when this happens in the muscles around the neck it can become very difficult to hold the head up and result in the head falling forward. \ud The situation can lead to extreme pain, restricted movement, problems with eating, drinking, swallowing, breathing and importantly adversely affect face to face communication. Ideally, a neck collar would help alleviate these important quality of life (QoL) issues. Current neck collar provision can be of limited use for people with MND and are regularly rejected by users as often they are designed to immobilise the head and neck, and can be socially stigmatising.\ud A fundamental reappraisal of the way these physical products are configured and used was undertaken. The project explored the use of open and empathic approaches to the co-design of solutions and further product designs role as developer and explorer of complex multidisciplinary, social and QoL issues. It demonstrates experts working openly together using a range of 'live' research practice methods to arrive at holistically considered optimum outcomes.\ud The project was funded by the NIHR i4i program. The team consisted of clinicians, engineers and designers working with partners including people experiencing MND and their carers. Processes included a range of research through design methods at the heart of which was a series of ten, iterative, co-design workshops. The team developed mutual empathies between project participants. These played a key role in the motivation to reach appropriate solutions.

The success or failure of new product innovations depend upon many, complex and often competing demands. These range from market conditions, availability of technology, psychology of consumer acceptance to the fundamental reasons for a particular product or technology existing in the first instance. The role of universities in this mix can compound success or failure issues further. Where there may be a desire and ambition to improve the quality of life of a population through new scientific or clinical discovery, often translating those discoveries to real world application is challenging.\ud The Wilson report, commissioned by the UK Government, 'A Review of Business–University Collaboration' highlights some of the issues universities and industry face and states that “There is no simple model for interaction; the diverse business needs and diversity of supply from universities leads to complexity in relationships” (Wilson, 2012). Based on the experiences of the authors of this paper and through a number of short health research and product development case studies this paper presents and discusses a theoretical model developed to help build greater understanding and demonstrate the value of design practices value in university and industry collaborations. It identifies 3D designs value through targeted activity towards successful outcomes and discusses how those projects have run in university research setting.

Search and rescue operations are often undertaken in low-visibility smoky environments in which rescue teams must rely on haptic feedback for navigation, exploration and safe exit. The aim is to enable a human being to explore the environment using a robot. In this paper we evaluate haptic means for robot to human communication. We describe the testing procedure and the results of our first tests. Based on these results, we discuss improvements of our design.

Introduction : People with Motor Neurone Disease (MND) often develop weak neck muscles, leading to pain, restricted movement and problems with swallowing, breathing and communication. Ideally, a neck collar would help alleviate these. However, neck collars currently available are of limited use for people with MND and often rejected by patients. The same is true for patients with neck weakness due to other conditions.\ud The Head-Up project is a 2 year study funded by the National Institute for Health Research's Invention for Innovation, or i4i, programme with a budget of £400k. Its principal aim is to develop a novel neck orthosis for neck weakness that supports whilst allowing freedom to move without negatively impacting quality of life. The research is a collaboration between clinicians, engineers, creative designers, patients and carer who will be working closely together is a co-design process. Manufacturers will be brought into this process at a later date. Ethical approval has been granted where necessary for all participatory elements.\ud Methods\ud The co-design process will inherently elicit subjective views. As such, prior to starting this workpackage, it was considered necessary to create a measure for this subjectivity and to give the design team a greater empathetic understanding of the inadequacies of current provision for this user group. This has been achieved by a combined clinical comfort assessment and engineering simulation.\ud An engineering simulation of the head, neck and upper torso has been developed using Finite Element Analysis. This has been called the Neck Assessment Tool (NAT). Real body geometry was obtained via a 3D laser scan. The neck has been modelled without any structural integrity such that the head will drop without support. The body model has been meshed and constrained to represent this scenario. The geometry of different neck collar models were created in separate files and meshed. Individually they are imported into the body model, appropriate contact conditions applied and the model is processed. Each model tells the researchers where there is contact between body and collar and, relatively, the pressure of that contact.\ud A clinical comfort assessment pilot study has been conducted using the design team members. This is based on location mapping from the McGill pain questionnaire and a Visual Analogue Scale. 5 different neck collars were identified based on common usage and distinct design differences. The members of the research team wore each collar for a day with recovery periods between. During each test period the participants recorded locations of pain/discomfort and perceptions of relative associated scales. They recorded other data relating to emotional reactions caused by the collars, impact on specific Activities of Daily Living (ADL's) and aesthetic considerations.\ud Results\ud The NAT has been conducted on 2 collars and the comfort assessment on 5, 2 of which are those tested in NAT. Comparisons between the comfort assessment and NAT demonstrate acceptable correlation, validating the simulation. The comfort assessment participant reporting forms have been refined and recruitment is under way to roll out to a wider population of health volunteers and use with MND volunteers to report about experiences of their specific collars as and when used. The design team reported significant differences in their perceptions of neck collars before and after the comfort assessment that will positively impact the co-design process.\ud References\ud 1. Ambrogio N et al, 'A Comparison of Three Types of Neck Support in Fibromyalgia Patients', Arthritis Care and Research (1998), v11, n5, pp 405-410\ud 2. Bowen SJ, Chamberlain PM, 'Engaging the Ageing: Designing Artefacts to Provoke Dialogue', Designing Inclusive Futures (2008) Part I, 35-44, DOI: 10.1007/978-1-84800-211-1_4\ud 3. Carlsson AM, 'Assessment of chronic pain. I. Aspects of the reliability and validity of the visual analogue scale', Pain (1983) v16, n1, pp 87–101\ud 4. Escalante A, Lichtenstein MJ, Lawrence VA, Roberson M, Hazuda HP, ' Where does it hurt? Stability of recordings of pain location using the McGill Pain Map', The Journal of Rheumatology (1996) v23, n10, pp 1788-93\ud 5. Huges TJR, 'The Finite Element Method: Linear Static and Dynamic Finite Element Analysis', Inform (2000), v682, n2, p 682, Publisher: Dover Publications, ISSN: 00457825, ISBN: 0486411818\ud 6. Latimer N, Dixon S, Mcdermott C, Shaw P, McCarthy A, Tindale W, Heron N, 'Modelling the cost effectiveness of potential new neck collar for patients with motor neurone disease', http://www.sheffield.ac.uk/scharr/sections/heds/dps-2011\ud 7. Miller RG et al, ' Practice Parameter update: The care of the patient with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis: Multidisciplinary care, symptom management and cognitive/behavioural impairment(an evidence based review)', Neurology (2009), v73, pp 1218-1225\ud 8. Motor Neurone Disease Association, 'Head Supports', www.mndassociation.org/documents.rm?id=28\ud 9. Thumbikat P, Bailey C and Datta D, 'Orthoses for neck control', ACNR (2006) v6, pp 18-19\ud 10. Qing Hang Zhanga, Ee Chon Teoa, Hong Wan Nga, Vee Sin Lee, 'Finite element analysis of moment-rotation relationships for human cervical spine', Journal of Biomechanics (2006), v39, n1, pp1 89–193

Research and development work relating to assistive technology \ud 2010-11 (Department of Health)\ud Presented to Parliament pursuant to Section 22 of the Chronically Sick and Disabled Persons Act 1970

There are growing pressures (political, legislative and environmental) to increase material recovery through recycling. There are two basic recycling schemes in the UK; kerbside and bring-site schemes. With current kerbside schemes, when a householder becomes unable, through age, illness or disability, to physically move their waste containers (bins,boxes or bags) onto the pavement for collection, the refuse collection service provider will\ud enter the property premises, take the containers out to the refuse collection vehicle (RCV), empty them before returning them to the starting point. Obviously, with bring sites, people travel to the site and place the recycling in the banks themselves.\ud With an ageing population, increasing numbers of older people are requiring specialist recycling services. These are likely to become more time consuming and costly\ud as household numbers increase. Bring sites have obvious limitations for older people with their limited mobility and reduce strength. To date little or no previous research has been undertaken about barriers to recycling for older people and the implications to waste management providers of an ageing population. This paper describes initial work\ud beginning to assess this problem within Lab4Living at Sheffield Hallam University (SHU).In this positioning paper, we examine literature regarding barriers to recycling and relationships with age. We outline a hypothetical scenario for the impact of the ageing population on future material recovery rates in the UK, present the initial results of a survey and we describe the potential role that design can play to eliminate these barriers and our activities within this area in our project; ‘The Grey Areas of Green Design’.